Trash Talk Series - Circular Economy Startup Founders Panel

We were delighted to be joined by three startup founders in our Trash Talk Series in the spring, sharing their strategies to scale their solutions and overcome the inertia of consumer behavior.

Founded by Rebecca Hu, Glacier builds AI-enabled robotics to automate sorting in recycling facilities. Their technology stis on top of a waste line and goes in second by second to characterize the waste. Rebecca says that once you make automation cheap and run facilities at low cost, you can make a business case for more broad localized infrastructure, eliminating the cost hurdle of transporting recyclables to  faraway facility plans. Glacier plans to introduce sorting and identification technology upstream and downstream—to consumer households, trash trucks, reclaimers processing the feedstock, and packaging brands, in order to create a single source of truth on recirculating material. Today $123 billion worth of items that still have value end up in either the ocean or landfill. Glacier hopes to plug in at every point of this chain so that no item with value is left unused. 

Founded by Caroline Williams, Junee offers a borrow and return system of reusable takeaway packaging for workplaces in London. In the UK during lunch-on-the-go alone, 11 billion pieces of single use packaging are used per year. Junee is bringing this number down by creating a seamless, hassle-free process for their clients. They supply containers to partner cafes and restaurants, collect them from workplaces, clean them in industrial washers, and return them to the food vendors. Caroline notes that the biggest challenge to behavior change is the first bit of effort required to download their app. To overcome this hurdle, Junee participates in company all-hands during launch week and designs social events around the first user behavior. They also utilize gamification that rewards borrowing containers, and they partner with leadership boards to “create inter-company competition to leverage the different social cultures in an organization”.

Founded by Sarah Pinner, Beni is a browser extension that finds second-hand alternatives from across the internet. Beni is guided by a McKinsey report stating that by 2030, we must live in a world where 1 in 5 garments is traded through circular business models—whether it’s through resale or rental. They found that Gen Z and millennials care a lot about sustainability, but still buy fast fashion. 54% attribute this to high levels of convenience and time-saving. Beni has learned that people struggle most with returns and understanding how to use a resale site, so they are working to make those logistical frictions seamless. Beni is also expanding their product to other delivery channels like mobile and a searchable site to establish a new norm and “make it almost impossible not to choose resale”.